The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (19 page)

The official Indian dossier on the attacks is a brief constabulary account of the terrorists' journey from Pakistan by sea; their hijacking of an Indian fishing vessel; the murder of its crew and, later, after he had piloted them to their destination, its captain; their landing in an inflatable dinghy; and the various assignments undertaken by the five pairs of terrorists. Appended to the dossier is a list of foreigners killed in the attacks (the names of Indian citizens who died are not given) and a list of supplies the terrorists left behind on the hijacked boat, with photographs, presented as evidence that the men were in fact Pakistani nationals: "Made in Pakistan milk powder packets (Nestlé)...Shaving cream—Touchme, Made in Pakistan ... Pakistan made pickle." Nothing about the pickle conclusively identified it as Pakistani, but the weight of the other evidence was strongly against it.

Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan took a taxi from the waterfront to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The dossier briefly tells how, when "challenged" by police in the station during their shooting spree, the two retreated to the vicinity of Cama Hospital, planning to gather hostages and herd them into some sort of stronghold. At this point their plan jumped the tracks. Confronted by police near the hospital, they shot and killed three officers, took their car, and drove toward the waterfront. There they hijacked another car and drove west along Marine Drive until they were stopped at a police barricade near Chowpatti Beach.

According to some accounts, Kasab sustained a minor wound during the showdown on Marine Drive, in which Tukaram Ombale, a junior police officer armed only with a
lathi
(metal-tipped cane), managed to grab Kasab's weapon long enough for others to subdue him. Ombale died later of bullet wounds. Civilian onlookers beat Kasab unconscious before he was taken to a hospital where, exhausted and dehydrated, he asked for a saline injection—possibly a first-aid technique he'd learned during his training.

At first he told his captors that he didn't want to die. Then he begged them to kill him, if not for his own sake—to escape the ordeals of imprisonment, trial, and execution that certainly awaited him—then for the sake of his family in Pakistan. His actions would not go down well with Lashkar-e-Taiba. Besides his failure to carry out his orders and die fighting, he gave detailed information, including names, to Indian authorities, and at one point, demonstrating how unmotivated he was by anything like conscientious belief, he offered to do for India what he'd done for Lashkar. What the photographer D'Souza had observed in the train station the night of the attack—that the two killers seemed "so sure" of themselves—had disguised Kasab's fundamental neediness, ignorance, confusion, and fear.

 

Anne and I took a taxi to Chowpatti on our third day in Mumbai, weeks before I learned of the gun battle that had taken place there, ending in Khan's death and Kasab's arrest. Chowpatti Beach was mostly empty that morning, at least by Indian standards. Girls in saris stood knee-deep in the water, wringing out their skirts. A boy was trying to fly a kite in a fitful breeze. Somebody had drawn a heart with a love message in the sand.

We crossed a footbridge over Marine Drive, the street where Khan and Kasab had run into the police barricade, and asked directions to Mohandas Gandhi's former residence in Mumbai, now a museum called Mani Bhavan. A simple two-story wood-frame building on a shady street, it might be put on exhibit in a museum of museums. The books in the downstairs library, cloistered in their glass-doored cabinets, seemed too precious to read, and a churchlike hush pervaded the place. The brittle, water-stained photographs; the caption informing us that Gandhi rode a bicycle to the temple, shaved without a mirror, and scavenged in the street; the sophisticated naiveté of his letter to Hitler, calling him "friend" (he addressed Roosevelt the same way) and urging him to please reconsider the destruction of Europe; Gandhi's sandals, drinking cup, spindle, and fountain pen enshrined in a case on the wall—all possessed an eerie, sanctimonious aura. An Indian man later told us that every city in India has its own collection of the Mahatma's domestic tools, just as in every religion the bones of saints proliferate over time.

Upstairs we looked at miniature three-dimensional tableaux of significant events in Gandhi's life, among them a doll-sized Gandhi and his followers gathering salt on the shore of the Arabian Sea in 1933 to protest the British salt tax, the original target of his
satyagraha
(truth-force) campaign. The "force" of that philosophy helped free India from foreign domination, but it didn't prevent the violence that took place before and after Partition. Both Gandhi, the martial pacifist, and Chhatrapati Shivaji, the martial conqueror, are loved, praised, and extravagantly idealized throughout India, though these days the Gandhian philosophy tends to be seen as a venerable but irrelevant remnant of the past, worthy in principle but not in practice, and it's the man of violent means whose name is more commonly invoked by public institutions like Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

Famous Gandhi quotations had been framed and hung throughout the house. "The cry of blood for blood is barbarous," he said during the riots of 1946–47, when Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other en masse leading up to and following the creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan. We'd heard that cry at the demonstration outside the Taj Mahal Palace the day we arrived in Mumbai, and while those who cried for blood cried the loudest, other Indians, among them the novelist Amitav Ghosh, were calling for restraint. What the terrorists mainly hoped to achieve by the attacks, he pointed out in the
Hindustan Times
, was the panic-stricken response of the Indian government—the sort of response that the government of the United States had been gulled into after 9/11.

The upstairs room that Gandhi stayed in at Mani Bhavan is much as it was when he stayed in Mumbai. Central to its few deliberately simple furnishings is a spinning wheel, the symbol of Indian independence. That work as hard and monotonous as spinning came to represent freedom from oppression remains one of the compelling paradoxes of the Gandhi legend. It wasn't machinery itself he objected to, he said, but the "craze" for it. Another Gandhian precept, the idea that one can gain real power through nonviolent means, seems equally dated in an age of terrorism.

 

I started following Ajmal Kasab's story after returning from India, on the basis of what others wrote about him and his translated statements, first to the police, later to the trial judge. The cunning, spectacular nature of the attacks guaranteed wide and detailed news coverage—a side effect of terrorism that its architects depend on to advertise their cause. These days such attacks are more like publicity stunts than acts of war, and it may have been the lure of publicity, as much as needing a job or righteous hatred of the infidels, that convinced Kasab to enlist. To someone faced with the prospect of becoming a beggar or a thief, the alternative of worldly fame and a glorious martyrdom might look like a much better deal.

Back home I studied the photo of the trigger-happy kid from provincial Pakistan striding through the railway station and wondered what need was great enough, or what principle important enough, to make him want to kill innocent people. For all the effort and expense devoted on the official level to protecting us from terrorists in recent years, relatively little has gone toward understanding what motivates them. It's not just that we can't know but that we don't want to know. To do so is to risk seeing ourselves less than favorably, for example, as monopolists of wealth, the people living in the big house behind a locked gate in Rawalpindi that Kasab and Muzaffar Khan dreamed of pillaging: another class of untouchables at the opposite end of the social scale.

Months after his arrest, a video of Kasab's interrogation in the hospital was published on the Internet with a captioned translation. There's a bandage on his neck, and he's obviously in pain. When they asked him why he'd done it, he said that his father had first encouraged him to seek work with the mujahideen: "[My father] said, 'These people make loads of money, and so will you. You don't have to do anything difficult. We'll have money; we won't be poor anymore. Your brothers and sisters can get married. Look at these guys living the good life. You can be like them.'"

Asked how much money they'd given him and if it had been placed in an account, he said, "There's no account. They gave it to my dad." Some terrorist organizations are known to pay the families of volunteers for suicide missions or those, like Mumbai, in which the recruits are sworn to die fighting. But in Kasab's case, it's not clear who paid what to whom. Shortly after he was imprisoned, before Pakistani officials cut his family off from further contacts with the press, a reporter tracked down Ajmal's father in Faridkot and asked him if he had received or been promised money in exchange for his son's participation. He replied, "I don't sell my children."

Kasab first appeared before a judge without leaving his cell, on closed-circuit TV, to minimize the chances of a Jack Ruby—style execution. A "bomb-proof, chemical-proof" corridor was built especially for him so that he can walk safely between his cell and the judge's chamber. When not in court, he speaks to no one and has nothing to do in his fetid cell but read the Koran, a book that it had never occurred to him to read before becoming a terrorist. At the start of the legal proceedings he asked for a Pakistani lawyer and was denied. His first lawyer was attacked in her home by rock-throwing Hindu activists. When she was replaced because of a conflict of interest (she was also representing the family of one of the people killed in the attacks), the court assigned Abbas Kasmi as Kasab's defense lawyer.

Kasmi doesn't go anywhere without bodyguards. The social club he belonged to has blackballed him. He believes in the righteousness of the Indian judicial system, saying, "We want to prove to the world that we are a civilized nation and we give a fair trial even to a so-called terrorist." When he complained that Kasab's cell had "no fresh air or ray of light" and relayed his client's request for some perfume to mask the stink, the press made a deafening mockery of it.

Kasab's initial confession to police, in the hospital, was ruled inadmissible during the trial because it had been given under duress. His lawyer entered a plea of innocent for him, and India was preparing itself for months of contentious legal proceedings when Kasab surprised everyone, his lawyer included, by standing up and saying in Hindi that he was not, in fact, innocent. He just wanted to be sentenced and have the trial end. The last I heard, he wasn't so sure.

Fourteen months after the attacks, Indian and foreign news media continue to camp out at Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai's oldest and by every account its worst prison, where Kasab is being held in solitary confinement during his trial. For all the hatred directed at him by the Indian public—most of whom want to see him executed as quickly as possible both for the sake of justice and to keep from wasting any more of the taxpayers' money—he's also become an object of widespread fascination. The media still hang on his every word, and in his new career as a spokesperson for terrorism he has come as close to living "the good life" as he ever will.

Thus far Ajmal Kasab has accomplished two of the three goals he named in his schoolboy definition of jihad: he killed, and he became famous. He has yet to achieve the third goal—"being killed"—thereby completing, however inadequately, the terms of his contract with Lashkar. His imprisonment and trial have already cost the Indian people much greater effort and expense than the execution of an ordinary murderer, but it might be worth all the trouble. The trial of one man accused of "making war on India" is a far cry from what the designers of those attacks may have hoped for: another round of warfare between India and Pakistan. It has diverted national attention from Pakistan to a single, powerless Pakistani citizen, who has achieved greater fame as the surrogate object of national vengeance than he ever hoped for.

"I do not want punishment from God," he told the judge. As if he had any choice in the matter. "Whatever I have done in this world I should get punished for it by this world itself."

The guilty man betrays his innocence.

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

A
USTRALIANS CALL THE NORTHERNMOST CHUNK
of their continent the "Top End," a breezy moniker, as though Australia were a boiled egg sitting upright in an eggcup waiting to be cracked open with a silver spoon. Just how much Top End there is is open to debate, the kind that gets worried out with maps drawn in the dust. While I was there last September, I saw dust maps that gave the Top End most of Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn—about a third of the continent. Others included only Cape York and the rather windswept-looking peninsula that includes the roistering town of Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory.

The Top End I visited was vastly narrower—the river flats and hill country just inland from Van Diemen Gulf. But it was still an imponderable slice of terrain, long ridges of sandstone giving way to the floodplains that edge Kakadu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the largest park in Australia—bigger than Connecticut and Delaware combined. To Australians, Kakadu and the country around it feels like an ancestral reservoir, a cultural repository with Aboriginal roots and an oasis of native biodiversity. Here, the sandstone endures, the monsoon floods come and go, and then the fires follow—erratic and regenerative in the early part of the dry season, unforgiving in the later part. But this oasis is going dry almost unnoticed.

This is a landscape that seems to ask, "Why have you come here?" There's no hostility in the question, only the indifference native to a continent of punitive, natural harshness. Every traveler will have a different answer. Mine was mud, and also, more broadly, the difference between nature as a norm and nature as merely what is, whether it should be or not. Here, the grandeur of nature is well disguised by the impenetrable thicket of life itself.